Pythagorean Calculator

thingiverse

A little project I have been working on for a few days, a simple slide ruler for calculating the sides of a right triangle. All that's needed is about an hour and a half of printer time and maybe half a dollar worth of hardware. I made this on a whim and hope it can help out some teachers teaching the Pythagorean Theorem or even trigonometry. After printing the two pieces, body1 and body2, all that is needed two bolts and two nuts. This model was specifically designed to use bolts that are 1/4 inches in diameter, and therefor, 1/4 inch nuts. One bolt goes in the bottom slide, another goes in the side slide, and then placing body2 angled so that it will create a right triangle, screw down the bolts with the nuts. The nuts are used to tighten the plastic together so that the hypotenuse doesn't slide while taking measurements, but can be loosened to allow for the re adjusting of the hypotenuse. Most importantly though, each side of the triangle has little indents in it, each of those indents is a quarter of an inch, and will aid in actually taking the measurements.